Who Built Nations in Eurasia? How Writers, Artists, and Professors Shaped Beliefs about National Identity

How can we explain the diversity of ways that nationality has been imagined in multi-national states? Why do some national groups remain loyal to multi-nationalism, while others reject it? When is nationality meaningful to begin with?

This project provides such a theory to explain variation in national beliefs in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was the first multinational state in that it systematically inculcated national identity amongst its citizens by investing in native-language education and building indigenous cultural intelligentsias under a single, sovereign, socialist roof. My theory tells us how Soviet nation-building did in fact shape the way that everyday Soviet citizens thought about national identity.

I distinguish between two distinct dimensions of nationality: the political implications of nationality for the state, and the meaningfulness of nationality to begin with. To explain the former dimension, I point to the writers, artists, and professors that let nationalist movements during the collapse of communism. Members of these national intelligentsia, like the poet Silva Kaputikyan in Armenia, the writer Zviad Gamsakhurdia in Georgia, and the musicologist Vytautas Landsbergis in Lithuania had long histories of advocating over communal grievances in the offices of writers unions and hallways of national academies. When Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberalizing policies lifted the constraints of Soviet censorship, it was these communal grievances that became the seeds of popular movements that would eventually challenge Soviet multinationalism.

I do not suggest, however, that structure did not matter. Rather, the legacy of mass native-language literacy continued to shape which categories of nationality were already meaningful to everyday Soviet citizens. In this way, mass native-language literacy would empower or constrain the ability of national intelligentsias to popularize their communal grievances. Intelligentsia seeking to popularize communal grievances made appeals based on imagined membership in the nation, and such claims only rang true when these nations were already clearly defined and easily understood – when it was unquestionable that they existed in the first place. In this way, the long-term influence of mass literacy and the proximate effect of intelligentsias - structure and agency - together explain the full diversity of ways that nationality was imagined in Eurasia in this period.

These files contain the data necessary to replicate the quantitative analyses from Chapters 4, 6, and 7 of this project. They include published event data from Beissinger (2002) on nationalist mobilization in the Soviet Union in 1987-91, original archival data on voting in 1946, original archival data on the Soviet literacy campaigns form 1920 to 1951, census data, and 1989 electoral data from digitized primary sources. Please contact the author with specific questions.